"Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." --Ishmael

The book that everyone wants to have read but never really wants to read. Or so I've heard.

I have to admit, because I'm reading this for school I was definitely not in a particularly open-minded mood when I first started reading, so I went through 100 pages of it without being aware of a single thing that was happening, or even knowing what the hell I was reading. Just about everything flew straight over my head. I swear I was falling asleep every 10 pages and my forehead hurt from dropping onto the book so much every time that happened.

Now I've been forced to go back and annotate, leading me to reread everything I'd "read" earlier, and I've got to say it's doing wonders. There's a surprisingly exciting story here, Ishmael's got an entertaining sense of humor, and the language isn't too dense if you actually sit down and work through it as you would with any other book. It is, contrary to my expectations due to this book's rather ridiculous reputation, NOT the ponderous, heavy, overloaded, jargon-infected philosophical treatise I'd been led to think it was.

Plus...the novel's first line. "Call me Ishmael." That charmed me right off the bat even on my first muddle-headed read.